Paul F. deLespinasse: Mind over matter in search for meaning

Wednesday

Dec 5, 2018 at 2:01 AM

To speculate that there is no God, no soul and no creation can be legitimate, but biology and the other physical sciences have no way to test such guesses. In his best-selling book, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind,” Yuval Noah Harari grossly abuses science by claiming it as authority for conclusions like these, which lie beyond the scope of its competence.

Socrates maintained that happiness requires us to understand our own nature correctly: “Know thyself!” Harari seems to think that Socrates got it backwards:

“If happiness is based on feeling pleasant sensations, then in order to be happier we need to re-engineer our biochemical system. If happiness is based on feeling that life is meaningful, then in order to be happier we need to delude ourselves more effectively.”

According to Harari “from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no purpose.”

Reviewer Ashish Singal summarizes Harari’s conclusion: “Our search for happiness and meaning inevitably involves lying to ourselves.” Harari may think we need to lie to ourselves because he thinks that biological science proves that we are beings with absolutely no cosmic significance.

Someone once joked that a behaviorist is someone who makes up his windpipe that he has no mind. Harari sounds like he has done exactly that:

“Scientists studying … the human organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behavior is determined by hormones, genes and synopses, rather than by free will — the same forces that determine the behavior of chimpanzes, wolves, and ants. Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient findings under the carpet.”

Notice that after reporting that some scientists “argue” a certain thing, Harari then refers to what they argue as “findings.” Such “reasoning” permeates his discussion.

Harari maintains that “According to the science of biology, people were not created. They have evolved.” He does not consider the possibility this is a false dichotomy, that creation need not be assumed to occur at one point in time but might take place over a considerable period of time — which sounds suspiciously like evolution.

Perhaps his failure to consider this possibility rests on his belief that “Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a Creator. …”. Biology, of course, can tell us no such thing.

Rounding out his depiction of human nature, Harari accepts without critical scrutiny currently fashionable assumptions about the human brain. He tells us that we store information in our brains, but then admits that “Exactly how the brain does it remains a mystery.” Despite telling us that “biologists admit that they still don’t have any good explanation for how brains produce consciousness,” he simply assumes that consciousness and memory are functions of the brain.

Later, however, Harari contradicts his earlier assumptions about the brain:

“Yet of all the projects currently under development, the most revolutionary is the attempt to devise a direct two-way brain-computer interface that will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn. What if such interfaces are used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or to directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort of Inter-brain-net? What might happen to human memory, human consciousness and human identity if the brain has direct access to a collective memory bank? In such a situation, one cyborg could, for example, retrieve the memories of another — not hear about them, not read about them in an autobiography, not imagine them, but directly remember them as if they were his own?”

If we might remember things that are “stored” someplace else, this undermines Harari’s assumption that memories have got to be stored in our brains.

Harari talks about “interfaces,” but doesn’t consider the possibility that the brain itself is an interface (connection) between the body and a nonphysical mind not located in space or in time. In this case it would be plausible to think that memory and consciousness are functions of the mind rather than of the brain. This would explain why scientists can’t figure out how the brain produces consciousness and stores memories. If the brain does neither of these things, naturally nobody could explain how it does them.

A concept of human nature in which our actions are controlled by our nonmaterial minds rather than by the blind operation of physical causation (“hormones, genes, and synopses”) and in which human life is not meaningless might make it unnecessary to drug our brains to make us happy, as the author recommends. Nor would we need to lie to ourselves about our own nature. Perhaps Socrates was right and our present unhappiness results from failure to understand our true natures.

Paul F. deLespinasse is professor emeritus of political science and computer science at Adrian College. His latest book is “Beyond Capitalism: A Classless Society With (Mostly) Free Markets,” and he can be reached at mailto:pdeles@proaxis.com. This column first appeared on www.newsmax.com.

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